Eight days ago Ozy announced it was shutting down after reports that the news site bought traffic, overstated its cable deals, and at one point even had its Chief Operating Officer impersonate a YouTube executive during a phone call with investors.

Then four days ago, Ozy's CEO said he planned to relaunch the company's newsletters (while looking for new board members) to try to instead revive the company. "Ozy Media boasts that it has more than 26 million subscribers for its newsletters," reports Forbes...

"But former employees say this is another example of deceptive tactics at the embattled digital media company, with most of the email addresses on its newsletter lists either purchased, taken from other companies without their permission or added back to the lists after the recipients unsubscribed — a potentially illegal act." Three ex-employees with knowledge of Ozy's newsletter operations, who asked to remain anonymous because of non-disclosure agreements they signed, said the company on multiple occasions obtained large numbers of email addresses through marketing partnerships it formed with other companies and news outlets. Ozy would offer to send an email for the other company as part of the partnership, and some companies would then share a list of addresses for a supposed one-time message. Instead, the former employees allege, those email addresses would then be permanently added to Ozy's newsletter subscriber list. Among the companies they say Ozy collectively accumulated millions of email addresses from were the McClatchy newspaper chain and the technology magazine Wired, according to two of the former employees.

Ozy would also buy in bulk email addresses from third-party websites like U.S. Data Corporation and Exact Data, ramping up the size of its newsletter following in order to fulfill advertising deals with its clients. After Ozy added batches of new addresses to its mailing lists, many recipients would attempt to unsubscribe from the newsletters only to be kept on the distribution lists and even re-subscribed under the direction of Ozy management, a potential violation of commercial email laws...

Despite a "very small" organic audience and low engagement numbers, according to a source with knowledge of Ozy's newsletter audience, Ozy sent a pitch deck to investors over the summer for its Series D funding round that claimed it was achieving an email open rate of 25%, or (in Ozy's words): "2.5x the industry standard." Ozy founder and CEO Carlos Watson admitted that number was exaggerated during a Monday interview with CNBC, claiming it instead represents the engagement rate among Ozy's "best, most regular people." Watson still claimed this subset of Ozy's audience is between 10 and 12 million people.
Forbes adds that there was no response to their request for a comment from Ozy, McClatchy, and Wired's parent company Conde Nast.

FallOutBoyTonto writes: It is safe to say that Russian President Vladimir Putin is not a fan of independent media. In the run-up to elections last month, Putin declared almost every independent media organization operating inside the country a "foreign agent" to stifle dissent and criticism. The intent seems to be to destroy independent media in Russia.

Now, this campaign has been extended to coverage of space activities in Russia. The country already prohibits reporting on space activities containing classified information, but a new law extends to coverage of a variety of other space news. Essentially, any person in Russia who now reports on anything that might be even tangentially related to Russia's military activities or space activities will be labeled as a foreign agent.

The American media company Ozy "boasted of a large audience for its general interest website, its newsletters and its videos," remembers the New York Times, calling it "a Gen X dream of what millennial media ought to be: earnest, policy-focused, inclusive, slickly sans-serif." Ozy was founded in 2013 with seed funding from Laurene Powell Jobs, followed by further investments that by 2020 were over $83 million (according to the data service PitchBook).

But the Times reports that something strange happened last winter while Ozy was pursuing a $40 million investment from Goldman Sachs: Ozy said it had a great relationship with YouTube, where many of its videos attracted more than a million views... That's what the Zoom videoconference on February 2 that Ozy arranged between the Goldman Sachs asset management division and YouTube was supposed to be about. The scheduled participants included Alex Piper, the head of unscripted programming for YouTube Originals.

He was running late and apologized to the Goldman Sachs team, saying he'd had trouble logging onto Zoom, and he suggested that the meeting be moved to a conference call, according to four people who were briefed on the meeting, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to reveal details of a private discussion. Once everyone had made the switch to an old-fashioned conference call, the guest told the bankers what they had been wanting to hear: that Ozy was a great success on YouTube, racking up significant views and ad dollars, and that [CEO/co-founder Carlos] Watson was as good a leader as he seemed to be. As he spoke, however, the man's voice began to sound strange to the Goldman Sachs team, as though it might have been digitally altered, the four people said.

After the meeting, someone on the Goldman Sachs side reached out to Mr. Piper, not through the Gmail address that Mr. Watson had provided before the meeting, but through Mr. Piper's assistant at YouTube. That's when things got weird. A confused Mr. Piper told the Goldman Sachs investor that he had never spoken with her before. Someone else, it seemed, had been playing the part of Mr. Piper on the call with Ozy.
Four people told the Times that CEO Watson later said the voice on the call belonged to Ozy co-founder/chief operating officer Samir Rao and attributed the incident to a temporary mental health crisis. Ozy's chairman of the board called it "an unfortunate one-time event." But in addition the site's editor-at-large — who was fired earlier this year — says Ozy's claims of 50 million unique users a month "seemed high," according to the Times: In 2017, BuzzFeed News reported that Ozy had been among the publishers buying web traffic from "low-quality sources," companies using systems that caused articles to pop open under a reader's browser without the reader's knowledge. Ozy said it had been buying the traffic to build its email lists and had not billed advertisers for those views... Ozy doesn't rely on standard measurements of traffic, but the best known service, Comscore, shows nothing close to the company's public claims. According to Comscore, Ozy reached nearly 2.5 million people during some months in 2018, but only 230,000 people in June 2021 and 479,000 in July.

Mr. Watson called the Comscore numbers "incomplete," noting they don't include impressions on platforms ranging from social media to television and podcasts.
The Times' story "triggered canceled shows, an internal investigation, investor concern and high-level departures at the company," ABC News reported Friday. And the same day the Times delivered one more update — that Ozy was shutting down: In an article in The Times on Thursday, Brad Bessey, an Emmy-winning executive producer, and Heidi Clements, a longtime TV writer, said Ozy executives had misled them while they were working on "The Carlos Watson Show," Mr. Watson's talk show, for the company. Specifically, they said, executives told them that the show would appear on the cable network A&E. Mr. Bessey resigned when he learned there was no such deal in place, and the show ended up appearing on YouTube and the Ozy website.

Also this week: Advertisers including Chevrolet, Walmart, Facebook, Target and Goldman Sachs itself — many of which had been paying for placement on "The Carlos Watson Show" — hit the brakes on their spending with Ozy. By Friday afternoon, Mr. Watson and the other remaining board member, Michael Moe (another high-profile investment figure, who had published a book called "Finding the Next Starbucks"), concluded that the company could not recover and issued the farewell statement through a spokeswoman....

The Ozy staff received the news that the company was no more on Friday afternoon.

UPDATE: America's Federal Bureau of Investigation has now "withdrawn a subpoena demanding records from USA TODAY that would identify readers of a February story about a southern Florida shootout that killed two agents and wounded three others," the newspaper reported today.

Friday USA Today had reported that it's "fighting a subpoena from the FBI demanding records that would identify readers of a February story" about a Southern Florida shooting that killed two of the investigative agency's agents and wounded three others.

Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shared their original report on Friday: In a motion filed in federal district court in Washington, D.C. asking a judge to quash the subpoena, Gannett, USA TODAY's parent company, said the effort is not only unconstitutional but also violates the Justice Department's own rules... The subpoena, issued in April, demands the production of records containing IP addresses and other identifying information "for computers and other electronic devices" that accessed the story during a 35-minute time frame starting at 8:03 p.m. on the day of the shooting.

"Being forced to tell the government who reads what on our websites is a clear violation of the First Amendment," Maribel Perez Wadsworth, USA TODAY's publisher, said in a statement. "The FBI's subpoena asks for private information about readers of our journalism...."

The subpoena, signed by an FBI agent in Maryland, said the records relate to a criminal investigation. But it's unclear how USA TODAY's readership records are related to the investigation of the Florida shooting, or why the FBI is focusing on the time frame. Wadsworth said Gannett's attorneys tried to contact the FBI before and after the company fought the subpoena in court, but she said the FBI has yet to provide any meaningful explanation of the basis for the subpoena.

The FBI and the Justice Department declined to comment.

Crypto giant Coinbase on Thursday launched its own media operation. The company is calling it "Fact Check" -- and giving it a dedicated section on its blog. In a blog post, Coinbase Founder and CEO Brian Armstrong said the firm, which recently went public, will use Fact Check to combat misinformation and mischaracterizations about Coinbase or crypto being shared in the world.

"Unfortunately, we also see misinformation published frequently as well, whether in traditional media, social media, or by public figures. This doesn't always come from negative intentions. Our business, and crypto, can be difficult to understand, and often people are rushed to post first impressions online, making mistakes in the process. At other times, misinformation comes from people pushing their own agenda, or from those who have a conflict of interest," wrote Armstrong, who in the post outlines in detail his thinking behind launching Fact Check. An excerpt from the blogpost: In the future, we will need to move beyond fact checking, and start creating more of our own original content to communicate with our audience, and tell the stories of crypto that are happening all over the world. Many of these stories are not being told by traditional media. Fact checking is still largely reactive, but we need to move to a more proactive stance on content creation to have a true media arm. Distribution of our content will happen through podcasts, YouTube, our blog, Twitter, and every other channel we own. But in the future, it will also likely move to more crypto native platforms, like Bitclout, or crypto oracles. Long term, the real source of truth will be what can be found on-chain, with a cryptographic signature attached.

"Despite early claims by #Tesla #ElonMusk, Autopilot WAS engaged in tragic crash in The Woodlands," tweeted U.S. Congressman Kevin Brady on Wednesday. (Adding "We need answers.")

But maybe it depends on how you define Autopilot. CNN reports: Tesla said Monday that one of Autopilot's features was active during the April 17 crash that killed two men in Spring, Texas....

Lars Moravy, Tesla's vice president of vehicle engineering, said on the company's earnings call Monday that Tesla's adaptive cruise control was engaged and accelerated to 30 mph before the car crashed. Autopilot is a suite of driver assistance features, including traffic-aware cruise control and Autosteer, according to Tesla's website... The North American owner's manuals for the Model 3, Model S and Model X, all describe traffic-aware cruise control as an Autopilot feature. Tesla's revelation may be at odds with the initial description of the crash from its CEO Elon Musk, who said two days after the crash that "data logs recovered so far show Autopilot was not enabled."
Alternately, Forbes suggests there may just be some confusion, noting that earnings call included descriptions of tests Tesla performed on one of their own cars after the accident. So when they said adaptive cruise control "only accelerated the car to 30mph [over] the distance before the car crashed," they could just have been referring to their own experiments. (Tesla also points out adaptive cruise control only engages when the driver is buckled — and disengages slowly if they're unbuckled — and after the Texas crash all seat belts were unbuckled.)

Why so much confusion? Part of the problem may be, as CNN points out, that Tesla "generally does not engage with the professional news media."

But The Drive shares another theory about the crash: A relative of the deceased told a local news station that the owner allegedly "may have hopped in the back seat after backing the car out of the driveway." Moments later, the car crashed when it failed to negotiate a turn at high speed.
CNN adds: Bryan Reimer, the associate director of the New England University Transportation Center at MIT, who studies driver assistance systems like Autopilot, said one of the plausible explanations for the crash is that the driver was confused and thought they had activated Autosteer, when only traffic-aware cruise control had been turned on. "The general understanding of Autopilot is that it's one feature, but in reality it is two things bolted together," said Reimer, referring to traffic-aware cruise control and Autosteer.
But according to the Washington Post, Tesla also disputes that theory: Tesla executives on Monday claimed a driver was behind the wheel at the time of a fatal crash that killed two in suburban Houston this month, contradicting local authorities who have previously said they were certain no one was in that seat. Tesla made the statement on its earnings call Monday... Lars Moravy, the company's vice president of vehicle engineering, said the steering wheel was "deformed," indicating a driver's presence at the time of the crash...

Mark Herman, constable for Harris County Precinct 4, told the station KHOU that police were "100 percent certain that no one was in the driver's seat."

"Ville de Bitche is a town situated in northwestern France with a rich military history, pastoral landscape, and an unfortunate sounding name," reports Slate. (Adding that the "e" is silent....)

"Recently tiny Bitche made international headlines after Facebook mistook the city's name for a swear word and deleted the town's Facebook page." The city's communication manager, Valêrie Degouy, contacted Facebook on March 19 to explain the situation and ask the company to reverse its decision — for the second time. (The page was previously deleted in 2016.) As she awaited Facebook's response — which apologized and reinstated the page Tuesday — Degouy set up a new page for her town, under the name of Marie 57230, her city's postal code. Although Facebook's mistake seems innocuous enough, for the towns located around Bitche, local Facebook pages serve as the main form of communication. Shutting the page down effectively creates a local news blackout. When Rohrbach-les Bitche — a nearby town in the region — heard about the deletion, it quickly rid "ls-Bitche" from its Facebook page name to avoid a similar fate...

The residents of Bitche are far from alone in their reliance on Facebook for local news. In the United States alone, more than 2,000 local newspapers have closed over the past two decades, according to an estimate from Joshua Scacco, associate professor of political communication at the University of South Florida. In these news deserts, Facebook has risen as an alternative information source, allowing anyone with an account to share updates and post events...

But Facebook is not only filling the local news void — it is tied to local papers' disappearance. "Social and digital media are a contributing factor in thinking about the declines of the presence of local newsrooms, as well as what that coverage looks like for the local newsrooms that remain," Scacco says. Facebook is moving advertising dollars away from local newspapers, and even driving the content local newspapers create. Local news coverage often panders to Facebook's algorithms when creating content and headlines, notes Ashley Muddiman, a communications professor at the University of Kansas.

The New York Times explores whether Substack is just a company that makes it easy to charge for newsletters — or a new direct-to-consumer media that's part of a larger cultural shift? This new ability of individuals to make a living directly from their audiences isn't just transforming journalism. It's also been the case for adult performers on OnlyFans, musicians on Patreon, B-list celebrities on Cameo. In Hollywood, too, power has migrated toward talent, whether it's marquee showrunners or actors. This power shift is a major headache for big institutions, from The New York Times to record labels. And Silicon Valley investors, eager to disrupt and angry at their portrayal in big media, have been gleefully backing it. Substack embodies this cultural shift, but it's riding the wave, not creating it...

A New York Times opinion writer, Charlie Warzel, is departing to start a publication on Substack called Galaxy Brain... The Times wouldn't comment on his move, but is among the media companies trying to develop its own answer to Substack and recently brought the columnist Paul Krugman's free Substack newsletter to the Times platform... [T]he biggest threat to Substack is unlikely to be the Twitter-centric political battles among some of its writers. The real threat is competing platforms with a different model. The most technically powerful of those is probably Ghost, which allows writers to send and charge for newsletters, with monthly fees starting at $9. While Substack is backed by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, Ghost has Wikipedia vibes: It is open-source software developed by a nonprofit...

And it's easy to leave. Unlike on Facebook or Twitter, Substack writers can simply take their email lists and direct connections to their readers with them. Substack's model of taking 10 percent of its writers' subscriptions is "too greedy of a slice to take of anyone's business with very little in return," said Ghost's founder and chief executive, John O'Nolan, a tattooed, nomadic Irishman who is bivouacked in Hollywood, Fla. He said he believed subscription newsletter publishing was "destined to be commoditized."

But Ghost represents an even purer departure from legacy media. More than half of the sites on the platform simply run the software off their own servers. "The technology is designed to be decentralized, and there's no one institution or one corporation that can decide what is OK," he said.
The article also notes that Twitter recently bought the newsletter platform Revue, while Facebook "is developing ambitious plans for a rival that will provide a platform for local journalists, among other writers."

And in a section on indie spirit, it adds as an aside that Bustle Digital Group "confirmed to me that it's reviving the legendary blog Gawker under a former Gawker writer, Leah Finnegan."

Four times in recent weeks, the White House press secretary was relayed questions from someone that Mediate describes as "a gag persona for a former Secretary of State made of Legos."

The reporters believed they were helping a real reporter who was prohibited by Covid protocols from attending. Politico reports: That colleague, who goes by the name Kacey Montagu, doesn't exist — at least not as an actual reporter. Since late last year, Montagu has taken on the identity of a White House correspondent extraordinaire with a fictional outlet to boot: White House News, shortened in emails to WHN... In communications with confidants, Montagu has posed as a member of White House Correspondents Association, claiming to be a reporter for The Daily Mail, the British tabloid known for its gossipy coverage of celebrities and political figures. Montagu also communicates regularly with top White House reporters and has had several exchanges with White House officials.

But Montagu never joined WHCA and The Daily Mail. There is no Kacey Montagu, except as a digital impersonation of a White House correspondent...

Montagu's activity is a remarkable illustration of how the online landscape, along with the age of pandemic-related virtual work, has opened up avenues for the mischievous-minded to infiltrate the top echelons of power. What's perhaps more remarkable is that he or she did it all without raising a solitary eyebrow... until Thursday.
Montagu had started a Twitter account showing the schedules of White House officials, which ultimately attracted a following by actual White House correspondents and even some minor government staffers, according to the article.

Acquaintances...believe Montagu's White House moonlighting began as something to boast about in the online global gaming platform called ROBLOX, where users jokingly call themselves "Legos." Within that platform is a role-playing group called nUSA, where people from across the world engage in a mock U.S. government exercise...

Another longtime member of the community in touch with Montagu said they suspected that they created the account "just for the memes" and never assumed things would progress this far.

China's government has asked Alibaba Group to dispose of its media assets, as officials grow more concerned about the technology giant's sway over public opinion in the country, WSJ reported Monday, citing people familiar with the matter. From a report: Discussions over the matter have been held since early this year, after Chinese regulators reviewed a list of media assets owned by the Hangzhou-headquartered company, whose mainstay business is online retail. Officials were appalled at how expansive Alibaba's media interests have become and asked the company to come up with a plan to substantially curtail its media holdings, the people said. Alibaba, founded by billionaire Jack Ma, has throughout the years assembled a formidable portfolio of media assets that span print, broadcast, digital, social media and advertising. Notable holdings include stakes in the Twitter-like Weibo platform and several popular Chinese digital and print news outlets, as well as the South China Morning Post, the premier English-language newspaper in Hong Kong. Several of these holdings are in U.S.-listed companies. Such influence is seen as posing serious challenges to the Chinese Communist Party and its own powerful propaganda apparatus, the people said.

ZDNet reports: A handful of technology giants operating in Australia have agreed on a code of practice that aims to stem disinformation on their respective platforms. All signatories — Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Redbubble, TikTok, and Twitter — have committed to the Australian Code of Practice on Disinformation and Misinformation. They have also committed to releasing an annual transparency report about their efforts under the code...

[The Code] provides seven guiding principles, with the first aimed at protecting freedom of expression. "Signatories should not be compelled by governments or other parties to remove content solely on the basis of its alleged falsity if the content would not otherwise be unlawful," the code said. Another is centred on protecting user privacy and notes that any actions taken by digital platforms to address the propagation of disinformation and misinformation should not contravene commitments they have made to respect the privacy of Australian users...

"Empowering users" is another principle, that is to enable users to make informed choices about digital media content that purports to be a source of authoritative current news or of factual information. Signatories also commited to supporting independent researchers and having policies and processes concerning advertising placements implemented.

Peter Daszak is part of the World Health Organization's 14-member team investigating the origins of the coronavirus. This weekend on Twitter he described "explaining key findings of our exhausting month-long work in China" to journalists — only to see team members "selectively misquoted to fit a narrative that was prescribed before the work began."

Daszak was responding to a New York Times article which painted China as uncooperative for failing to hand over some raw data. But ironically, the next day the Times published a longer interview they'd done with Daszak, which acknowledges that Daszak "said that the visit had provided some new clues..."

The Times had even specifically asked him if China's attitude made their work difficult, to which Daszak had explicitly answered: no. "You've got a task to do. You've volunteered. You know what it's going to be like. You get caught up in the historical importance. I don't know if we were the first foreigners to walk around the Huanan seafood market, which is blocked off even to Chinese citizens. The only people that have been in there have been the Chinese disease investigators. We met with the doctors that treated the first known Covid patients."
The Times also asked if they'd learned anything they didn't know before. Daszak's response: From Day 1, the data we were seeing were new that had never been seen outside China. Who were the vendors in the Huanan seafood market? Where did they get their supply chains? And what were the contacts of the first cases? How real were the first cases? What other clusters were there? When you asked for more, the Chinese scientists would go off, and a couple of days later, they've done the analysis, and we've got new information. It was extremely useful.
The team also learned how extensively China's disease-control center had investigated the Wuhan market: They'd actually done over 900 swabs in the end, a huge amount of work. They had been through the sewage system. They'd been into the air ventilation shaft to look for bats. They'd caught animals around the market. They'd caught cats, stray cats, rats, they even caught one weasel. They'd sampled snakes. People had live snakes at the market, live turtles, live frogs. Rabbits were there, rabbit carcasses... Animals were coming into that market that could have carried the coronavirus. They could have been infected by bats somewhere else in China and brought it in. So that's clue No. 1... Some of these are coming from places where we know the nearest relatives of the virus are found. So there's the real red flag...

There were other markets. And we do know that some of the patients had links to other markets. We need to do some further work, and then the Chinese colleagues need to do some further work...

What is the next step?

For the animals chain, it's straightforward. The suppliers are known. They know the farm name; they know the owner of the farm. You've got to go down to the farm and interview the farmer and the family. You've got to test them. You've got to test the community. You've got to go and look and see if there are any animals left at any farms nearby and see if they've got evidence of infection, and see if there is any cross-border movement.
The Times' interview begins by specifically acknowledging Daszak's statement about new information obtained on the visit, "which all of the scientists, Chinese and international, agreed most likely pointed to an animal origin within China or Southeast Asia.

"The scientists have largely discounted claims that the virus originated in a lab, saying that possibility was so unlikely that it was not worth further investigation."

Friday the New York Times (following up on reports from the Wall Street Journal) wrote that China had "refused to hand over" important raw data to a 14-member World Health Organization team investigating the origins of the coronavirus, reporting that "their Chinese counterparts were frustrated by the team's persistent questioning and demands for data."

But Saturday two of those 14 team members disputed that characterization, posting on Twitter that "This was NOT my experience" — even though the Times had quoted both of them to support its article.

First Peter Daszak, president of the U.S. national science academy's microbial threats forum, weighed in. "As lead of animal/environment working group I found trust and openness with my China counterparts. We DID get access to critical new data throughout. We DID increase our understanding of likely spillover pathways. New data included env. & animal carcass testing, names of suppliers to Huanan Market, analyses of excess mortality in Hubei, range of covid-like symptoms for months prior, sequence data linked to early cases & site visits w/ unvetted live Q&A etc. All in report coming soon!"

Then Thea Kølsen Fischer, a Danish epidemiologist on the team, tweeted that the Times hadn't accurately described her experience either. "We DID build up a good relationship in the Chinese/Int Epi-team! Allowing for heated arguments reflects a deep level of engagement in the room. Our quotes are intendedly twisted casting shadows over important scientific work."

Daszak reappeared to respond to her tweet, writing "Hear! Hear! It's disappointing to spend time with journalists explaining key findings of our exhausting month-long work in China, to see our colleagues selectively misquoted to fit a narrative that was prescribed before the work began. Shame on you @nytimes!"

Ironically, the next day the Times published a longer interview they'd done with Daszak, which acknowledges that Daszak "said that the visit had provided some new clues..."

The Times had even specifically asked him if China's attitude made their work difficult, to which Daszak explicitly had answered: no.

"Twenty five years ago I made a bet in the pages of Wired. It was a bet whether the world would collapse by the year 2020." So writes the 68-year-old founding executive editor of Wired magazine, Kevin Kelly.

He'd made the bet with a "Luddite-loving doomsayer," according to Wired — author Kirkpatrick Sale. "Sale while a student in the 1950s co-wrote a musical with Thomas Pynchon about escaping a dystopian America ruled by IBM," remembers Slashdot reader joeblog.

This month a new article in Wired re-visits that 25-year bet: They argued about the Amish, whether printing presses denuded forests, and the impact of technology on work. Sale believed it stole decent labor from people. Kelly replied that technology helped us make new things we couldn't make any other way. "I regard that as trivial," Sale said. Sale believed society was on the verge of collapse. That wasn't entirely bad, he argued. He hoped the few surviving humans would band together in small, tribal-style clusters. They wouldn't be just off the grid. There would be no grid. Which was dandy, as far as Sale was concerned...

Kelly then asked how, in a quarter century, one might determine whether Sale was right. Sale extemporaneously cited three factors: an economic disaster that would render the dollar worthless, causing a depression worse than the one in 1930; a rebellion of the poor against the monied; and a significant number of environmental catastrophes... "I bet you $1,000 that in the year 2020, we're not even close to the kind of disaster you describe," Kelly said. Sale barely had $1,000 in his bank account. But he figured that if he lost, a thousand bucks would be worth much less in 2020 anyway. He agreed... "Oh, boy," Kelly said after Sale wrote out the check. "This is easy money."

Twenty-five years later, the once distant deadline is here. We are locked down. Income equality hasn't been this bad since just before the Great Depression. California and Australia were on fire this year. We're about to find out how easy that money is... Sale failed to account for how human ingenuity would keep us from getting tossed into forests and caves. Kelly didn't factor in tech companies' reckless use of power or their shortcomings in solving (or sometimes stoking) tough societal problems...

Sale believes more than ever that society is basically crumbling — the process is just not far enough along to drive us from apartment blocks to huts. The collapse, he says, is "not like a building imploding and falling down, but like a slow avalanche that destroys and kills everything in its path, until it finally buries the whole village forever."

"I cannot accept that I lost," he wrote... "The clear trajectory of disasters shows that the world is much closer to my prediction. So clearly it cannot be said that Kevin won..."

Kelly warns Sale that history will recall him as a man who doesn't honor his word. But Sale doesn't believe that there will be a history.
Kelly responded by offering Sale a second double-or-nothing bet: I believe that we are in fact on the eve of a 25-year period of global progress and prosperity, the likes of which we have not seen before on this planet. In 25 years, poverty will be rare, and middle class lifestyle the norm. War between nations will also be rare. A bulk of our energy will be renewables, slowing down climate warming. Lifespans continue to lengthen. I'll bet on it.
Kelly added later that his rival "did not take me up on the double or nothing offer."

Friday afternoon CNBC reported that "heightened speculative trading by retail investors" (later referred to as "GameStop mania") had "continued to unnerve the market." The Dow Jones Industrial average lost 620.74 points, or 2%, to 29,982.62, the first time the 30-stock gauge has closed below the 30,000 mark since Dec. 14....

The market also experienced the highest trading volume in years as the mania heated up. On Wednesday, total market volume hit more than 23.7 billion shares, surpassing the level during the height of the financial crisis in 2008. Thursday also saw extremely heavy trading with more than 19 billion shares changing hands.
But Forbes reports that experts "seem in broad agreement that the bull market can rage on." "The market is not broken, but recent events have revealed some cracks," says Commonwealth Financial Network Chief Investment Officer Brad McMillan, who thinks one likely result of the week's frenzy could be that the price of options — which helped fuel some of the outsized meme-stock demand — rise to help curb "price hacking" in the future. McMillan eschews concerns from other experts that the Reddit-fueled price mania could be a sign the market is in the middle of a bubble akin to the dot-com era in the late 1990s, but he says "crackdown" by regulators is likely.
CNN pointed out that the tagline of Reddit's forum is "like 4chan found a Bloomberg terminal illness" — and cited two more reactions:

- "We've seen how social media can be manipulated to expose fault lines in our democracy," said Arthur Levitt, Jr., the former chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, in an op-ed [titled "Danger Lurks Beneath Reddit Day Traders' GameStop Triumph"]. "Are we certain the same isn't happening in our financial markets? Time to find out."

- "I think it's a real example of what we're already seeing with the way media has been upended," said Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian in an Instagram video this week. "All of these big institutions have been challenged, quietly and sometimes loudly, at moments, for the last 10 years with the rise of social media."

Meanwhile, CNBC's stock pundit Jim Cramer advised the traders who'd helped spark the runup to grab their profits now: "Take the home run. Don't go for the grand slam. Take the home run. You've already won. You've won the game. You're done," Cramer said on "Squawk on the Street."

"Please don't lose a lot of money on GameStop," added the "Mad Money" host.

Cramer, who's being treated in the hospital for a pinched nerve, said he called into CNBC in hopes of making sure people recognize the potential downside risk in GameStop and other soaring short squeezed stocks. "Don't let them get hurt. It's our job" to make sure people know they may get burned if the stock price collapses, he said....

Cramer said he was concerned about the stability of the rest of the U.S. equity market the longer the frenzied trading continued...

"I'm not saying that Reddit is good or bad, or that the shorts are good or bad," he said. "I'm just saying that the government has to step in and at least try to address the situation so the rest of the market isn't panicked by four stocks that are heavily shorted."

The Washington Post reports: Online misinformation about election fraud plunged 73 percent after several social media sites suspended President Trump and key allies last week, research firm Zignal Labs has found, underscoring the power of tech companies to limit the falsehoods poisoning public debate when they act aggressively.

The new research by the San Francisco-based analytics firm reported that conversations about election fraud dropped from 2.5 million mentions to 688,000 mentions across several social media sites in the week after Trump was banned from Twitter... The findings, from Jan. 9 through Friday, highlight how falsehoods flow across social media sites — reinforcing and amplifying each other — and offer an early indication of how concerted actions against misinformation can make a difference.
Kate Starbird, disinformation researcher at the University of Washington, also warned the Post that "What happens in the long term is still up in the air."

Since 1976 "Project Censored," a U.S.-based nonprofit media watchdog organization, has been identifying "the news that didn't make the news," the most significant stories it believes are being systematically overlooked. Slashdot ran stories about its annual list of the year's most censored news stories in 1999, 2003, 2004, and in 2007, when they'd presciently warned that the media was ignoring the issue of net neutrality.

But their latest list of underreported stories includes this disturbing headline: "Antibiotic Abuse: Pharmaceutical Profiteering Accelerates Superbugs." Pharmaceutical giants Abbott and Sun Pharma are providing dangerous amounts of antibiotics to unlicensed doctors in India and incentivizing them to overprescribe. In August 2019 the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ) reported that these unethical business practices are leading to a rise in superbugs, or bacterial infections that are resistant to antibiotic treatment. Bacteria naturally evolve a resistance to antibiotics over time, but the widespread and inappropriate use of antibiotics accelerates this process. Superbugs are killing at least 58,000 babies each year and rendering a growing number of patients untreatable with all available drugs.

India's unlicensed medical practitioners, known as "quack" doctors, are being courted by Abbott and Sun Pharma, billion-dollar companies that do business in more than one hundred countries, including the United States. The incentives these companies provide to quack doctors to sell antibiotics have included free medical equipment, gift cards, televisions, travel, and cash, earning some doctors nearly a quarter of their salary. "Sales representatives would also offer extra pills or money as an incentive to buy more antibiotics, encouraging potentially dangerous overprescription," a Sun Pharma sales representative revealed to an undercover BIJ reporter... [P]atients without access to better care often turn to quack doctors for treatment, and many are unaware that their local medical "professionals" have no formal training and are being bribed to sell unnecessary antibiotics.

In September 2019, the BIJ reported on similar problems with broken healthcare systems, medical corruption, and dangerous superbugs in Cambodia. Their account describes how patients often request antibiotics for common colds, to pour onto wounds, and to feed to animals. Illegally practicing doctors and pharmacists in Cambodia admitted that they would often prescribe based on customer requests rather than appropriate medical guidelines. As the BIJ noted, "This kind of misuse speeds up the creation of drug resistant bacteria, or superbugs, which are predicted to kill 10 million people by 2050 if no action is taken...."

Although superbugs have attracted some attention, their cause and importance remain poorly understood by the public. The Independent and BuzzFlash republished the Bureau of Investigative Journalism's report; otherwise, the role of pharmaceutical companies in the rise of dangerous superbugs has been drastically underreported.
The site's list of the top 25 censored stories of 2019 - 2020 also includes:

• Growing interest in so-called "public" banks, "not legally obligated to maximize profits, as private banks are; instead, public banks are mandated to serve their communities."

• How rising sea levels and warmer waters will impact nuclear power plants, "posing increased risks of nuclear disasters."

• Proposals to revitalize journalism through public funding.

• How the U.S. military represents "a massive, hidden contributor to the climate crisis."

A Chinese citizen journalist who covered Wuhan's coronavirus outbreak has been jailed for four years. From a report: Zhang Zhan was found guilty of "picking quarrels and provoking trouble", a frequent charge against activists. The 37-year-old former lawyer was detained in May, and has been on hunger strike for several months. Her lawyers say she is in poor health. Ms Zhang is one of several citizen journalists who have run into trouble for reporting on Wuhan. There is no free media in China and authorities are known to clamp down on activists or whistleblowers seen as undermining the government's response to the outbreak.

"A fake Queen Elizabeth danced across TV screens on Christmas as part of a 'deepfake' speech aired by a British broadcaster," reports CNN: The broadcaster said the video was supposed to offer "a stark warning about the advanced technology that is enabling the proliferation of misinformation and fake news in a digital age." Channel 4 annually accompanies the Queen's traditional speech with an "alternative Christmas message." This message has been aired since 1993. It has long attracted controversy. Previous people to have delivered the alternative speech include Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the former president of Iran. Other notable invitees include US whistleblower Edward Snowden, Jesse Jackson and the children who survived the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire.

But the 2020 iteration is rather different. This year Channel 4 hired VFX studio Framestore to create a fake Queen Elizabeth, who spoke candidly about personal matters. The video was manipulated using artificial intelligence technology. The deepfake Queen discusses Prince Harry and Meghan's move to North America, saying: "There are few things more hurtful than someone telling you they prefer the company of Canadians."

The fake Queen also performed a Tik Tok dance routine...

In her real Christmas message, the Queen commended frontline workers for their efforts during the pandemic and offered condolences to families who were unable to celebrate together due to coronavirus-related restrictions.
Channel 4 described their video as a "comedic parody," saying it raised an important question. "Is what we see and hear always as it seems?"

I've only paid for a magazine subscription once in my life — to Jack Rickard's Boardwatch magazine, which through the late 1990s was the geekiest read in town.

You can still read 70 issues of the magazine from more than 25 years ago at Archive.org. But this week the small Southeast Missourian newspaper reported that the magazine's original editor/publisher Jack Rickard has died at age 65: Following his graduation in 1973, Jack enlisted in the U.S. Navy. He proudly served aboard the USS Midway as an aviation support equipment technician. Following a distinguished tour in the Navy, Jack enjoyed a career as a technical writer in the defense industry.

Jack was a Mensa member and an early adopter of new technologies. His keen intelligence helped him to see the value of the internet as early as the 1980s. He started Boardwatch... Supported by a strong team, Jack developed Boardwatch into a successful magazine, which he sold in 1998.

Following his initial professional success, Jack proudly returned to his hometown of Cape Girardeau, Missouri. While in Cape Girardeau, Jack continued to pursue his interest in innovative technologies, including aviation and electric cars. In 2008, Jack established EVTV, an internet-based platform that taught individuals methods to convert gasoline-powered vehicles into electric-drive vehicles. As electric cars became popular, Jack expanded EVTV to focus on solar power storage.
Jack always felt like an old friend, even as his role in the tech community kept evolving. (Rickard's editorials at EVTV always featured a black-and-white sketch of the author — a tradition he'd continued through more than three decades of writing.)

Even Boardwatch "began as a publication for the online Bulletin Board Systems of the 1980s and 1990s," explains Wikipedia, "and ultimately evolved into a trade magazine for the Internet service provider (ISP) industry in the late 1990s... Boardwatch spawned an ISP industry tradeshow, ISPcon, and published a yearly Directory of Internet Service Providers. In 1998, Rickard sold a majority interest in Boardwatch and its related products to an East Coast multimedia company, which was then acquired by Penton Media in 1999 and moved to other ventures...
This week fans left testimonals on his funeral home's web site. "What an inspiration to mankind," read one. "Always enjoyed his views on any subject. We could use more people in this world with his wit and knowledge."

And another just wrote "Jack you were the most insightful speaker on the topic of electric vehicles. I enjoyed every second of your wisdom and videos and will continue to watch them for years to come. Rest In Peace my YouTube friend."